AMERICAN SPORTS NEEDS MORE FAIR-WEATHER FANS

When i was 10 years old, I was brainwashed. It was a perfectly legal maneuver. My uncle, who lived in New York City, observed that I liked to play baseball and took great care to impress upon me the superiority of the Yankees. This was the mid-1990s, an auspicious time to be hypnotized by pinstripes. Led by a telegenic talent who shared my first name, the team achieved dynastic dominance before the end of the decade.

I grew up in McLean, Virginia, some 300 miles from the Bronx, but my parents stood by and allowed the indoctrination. My mom regarded sports the way a vegan looks at a porterhouse steak, while my dad’s appraisal of the Washington, D.C., sports scene was straightforward: The Redskins were sinfully bad, the Bullets were worse, and hockey was too boring to merit an opinion. Lacking an appealing hometown team, I became a kind of free-agent fan, seeking out teams—the Yankees, the Miami Heat, the Indianapolis Colts—with likable stars. A winning percentage north of .500 didn’t hurt, either.

And so, without intending to adopt any sort of triumphalist attitude toward sports, I became that most despised of figures in the eyes of the diehard: a fair-weather fan. For most of my life, this has been a heavy shame. I have muttered shy apologies to friends for not standing by the hometown teams, even as most of them failed to escape the vortex of mediocrity.

But I’m done apologizing. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I’m right and everybody else is wrong. Rooting for winners is more than acceptable—it’s commendable. Fans shouldn’t put up with awfully managed teams for decades just because their parents liked those teams, as if sports were governed by the same rules and customs as medieval inheritance. Fans should feel free to shop for teams the way they do for any other product.

What I’m proposing here is a theory of fluid fandom that would encourage, as opposed to stigmatize, promiscuous sports allegiances. By permanently anchoring themselves to teams from their hometown or even an adopted town, sports fans consign themselves to needless misery. They also distort the marketplace by sending a signal to team owners that winning is orthogonal to fans’ long-term interests. Fluid fandom, I submit, is the emotionally, civically, and maybe even morally superior way to consume sports.

Fair-weather fan is a slur I have long endured but never understood. (Only in a country with tens of millions of citizens rooting for regular losers based north of the 40th parallel—in such climes as Buffalo, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis—could one sneer at the idea of “fair weather.”) The accusation is typically leveled by members of the many wretched tribes of sports addicts whose allegiances are dictated by geography or some cruel family curse. When Charles Darwin wrote of man bearing “the indelible stamp of his lowly origins,” he referred to all Homo sapiens, but the phrase might better fit its most sorrowful subspecies: people who still watch the Cleveland Browns.

I can hear the critics now: What of loyalty? What of the ecstatic, once-in-a-lifetime feeling of having endured decades of failure only to be present at the championship moment?

When I hear “once in a lifetime,” I think: Only once? Why is fleeting happiness a worthwhile trade-off for decades of agony? The belief that eventual victory will bring lasting happiness is a classic delusion; behavioral psychologists chalk it up to the “durability bias.” People assume that all sorts of positive events—a promotion, a wedding, a championship—will punch a ticket to permanent happiness. But no such ticket exists. All life is suffering, as Buddhists and Buffalo Bills fans will attest, and the suffering of sports fans is a biological fact. Studies led by researchers at the University of Utah and Indiana University have found that self-esteem, mood, and even testosterone levels plummet in male fans after a loss. Why relegate yourself to such misery?

One of the stronger arguments for unconditionally supporting even bad local teams is that doing so fosters a civic union that transcends class, politics, and other divisions, making small talk possible across otherwise unbridgeable divides. But this serves more aptly as an argument for the unifying power of sports than for any particular allegiance—many of my most entertaining sports conversations have been colorful exchanges with Red Sox fans. If anything, being a Yankees fan is a boon to sports banter; try getting somebody outside of Maryland to talk with you about the 2018 Baltimore Orioles.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/05/in-praise-of-fair-weather-fandom/556841/ 

Derek Thompson wrote:

Hell, I watch plenty of youth baseball that's more entertaining than most football games these days. That's sad.

Originally Posted by: Nonstopdrivel 

I respect fans that stick with THEIR team, whether they are great or lousy.
To jump from team to team to stick with whoever is winning is easy.
To me, that's easy. That doesn't make you a fan of a team, it makes you a fan of winners only.
That's my opinion.

Originally Posted by: Cheesey 

I don't belittle those that jump from team to team. I just think of them as fair weather fans.
Changing jerseys just so when you walk outside you can brag about how great your (insert team name) is, in my opinion, bandwagon jumpers. Not real "fans".
Not that I'm saying they aren't allowed to do so, it's just weak if you ask me. Look at the fans of teams that have never won a Super Bowl, yet show up season after season to cheer for THEIR team. Those, to me at least, are true fans.
An old saying I have heard is, "You don't love them because they are good, you love them because they are YOUR team". to me, that says it all. Anyone can cheer on a winner.
Again, these are my opinions ONLY. If someone wants to disagree, they can if they want.

Originally Posted by: Cheesey 

Oops, sorry, Alan. I wasn't inferring you were belittling. I was saying that just in general. I should have split that off and put it before your quote, my apologies.

I agree what you said here. Changing jersey for sole purpose to talk smack to other fans -- weak sauce magoo. If they are just changing their team to follow a winner, I have no issue with that. But yeah, if it's just so they can put down other fan bases? Sit yo punk booty down.

Originally Posted by: Zero2Cool